Editing User:Trungle/Cataphracts Idis/Recap (section)

== Early days ==

One of the strongest periods of my play was at the beginning of the game. My three neighbors were Lomowaza, Wischeppia, and Uuqita. My main adversary, as I was quickly told, was the savage peoples to the north who had recently united under a dictator and, assuming they were in an expansionist mood, had no other choice but to target Fenpr, ''their'' ancestral enemy.

In response to this, I decided that my first act as commander-in-chief of the Fenpri military would be to march north to oppose them. However, I decided I needed a plan to deal with all three of my neighbors. Fenpr is ''big'', maybe a bit smaller than Wischeppia but still quite a bit more massive than every other country on the map. Lomowaza was close enough to my starting location that I considered any aggression on their part more than possible to react to. I decided that even if I were in the middle of fighting Uuqita, if I kept an ear out for news from my eastern border, I could respond to Lomowazan aggression before too much damage was done. However, I foresaw disaster if Wischeppia were to attack.

Because of the speed at which information travels in this game, I feared that an invasion by the Wischeppians could spell disaster for Fenpr. I figured it might take up to a month to respond to a threat from such a far-flung place, giving my adversary plenty of time to situate themselves in formerly Fenpr-aligned fortresses, ready to lord over me from their more defensible position. And so, despite the fact that the Wischeppians weren’t even really mentioned in my opening goals, I decided to almost immediately split Fenpri command.

And so I brought in one of my longest-standing internet friends, Stone, who was assigned to roleplay my septuagenerian mother (a relationship that was extremely strange but surprisingly enjoyable to roleplay). I commanded her to march west with one of my detachments, raise a more significant army, and post up near the Wischeppian border in case anyone turned up to attack Fenpr This decision was one of my better ones in the entire game as but a few weeks after we both set out, I received a note from my mother confirming that a large Wischeppian army was indeed amassing. I dread to think of what the game may have turned into were my mother not there to sort things out.

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=== The first advance ===

My campaign against the Uuqitans, in the meantime, had already born fruit. The isthmus connecting Torvaldsen to the Uuqitan border only takes about five days to traverse, as does the path from the Uuqitan capitol to the same border. So it was that not even a week into the game, I engaged in my first battle against the Uuqitans.

This battle, taking place outside the Fenpri fortress of Hounslow, a site which would become well-acquainted with warfare, ended in a landslide victory on my side. I can’t truly claim too much credit for this. I defaulted to well-known military strategy and then got lucky on dice rolls. Hilariously, I did draft up a map describing the form my army would take, something I would never do again because it ultimately helped no one. Either way, I won enough advantage to take the commander prisoner. The captive commander, who told me their name was Umehi-Tso, suggested an alliance which I very well may have accepted with my current playstyle and knowledge of the game, but at the time felt far too risky. I still feel tremendously bad about this situation. It was a fine strategic move for me to leave them to captivity but it feels rather unsporting to remove a player so quickly with slim chance of return. It was no one’s fault but fate and yet I wish I could have found a way to let them keep playing as a commander.

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=== The first retreat ===

Now that I have regaled you with an story communicating my brilliance and one where my input had very little to do with the outcome, it is time to reach to the other end and talk about an instance where I failed spectacularly. After my defeat of the Uuqitans at Hounslow, I proceeded a day’s march north to the fortress of Tutugeri, where the bulk of the defeated soldiers had regressed to. It was here that I made perhaps one of the greatest military blunders in all of human history: underestimating how hard it is to pull off a siege. It is worth mentioning that I had not foraged once before arriving to Tutugeri. I was already running low on supplies and the sparse regions surrounding the enemy fortress did little to sustain me.

After about a week, things became problematic and I really needed to do something other than try to continue the clearly abortive attempt at a siege. There was a moment where I considered pulling the trigger on an invasion but I thought I could make the enemy wear themselves down by their constant harrying. They had been sending thousands of troops to kill up to a few hundred of my soldiers every night, but the random element was starting to work in my favor as they were almost as likely to lose soldiers as I was. I decided not to do anything as I felt that they were being whittled down more than I was. But they came to that same conclusion and stopped the harrying campaign. I could have either retreated to prevent any losses or attempted to take the fortress.

Perhaps I should have done anything else; however, in my defense, there was a conflating factor. Rumors of a rebellion against the dictator surfacing in the west. This development seemed promising. The Uuqitan dictator’s rise to power was seemingly less universally acclaimed than he wanted to admit. Operating under the doctrine that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I sent a messenger to the rebellious force which I would soon learn had taken to calling themselves “West Uuqita.” And when my scouts reported a West Uuqitan army just a day away, I sent a messenger requesting that we discuss a cooperation against the loyalist forces. Unfortunately, they were having none of this and engaged my army.

As I drafted battle plans, I made one critical miscalculation that changed the face of the entire conflict. I assumed that the West Uuqitans were trying to steal the siege so that they could capture Tutugeri. Without a nuanced understanding of West Uuqita’s goals, that was the only thing that I could think they were doing. Under that assumption, I ordered my troops to peel away from the city walls to engage West Uuqita head-on. Unfortunately for me, the loyalists were actually in league with the West Uuqitans and my order to attack the approaching force let them spill out to attack my troops. It was disastrous for my army and we retreated several days to the Fenpri fortress of Ghenio, to the south of Hounslow.

The West Uuqitan commander, one Yuqiwuara the 5th, was kind enough to inform me of what had just happened. Despite West Uuqita’s hatred of the despot’s government, the two had reached an uneasy agreement as the despot had painted Fenpr as a far greater evil than East Uuqita. Through a campaign of lies, he claimed that Fenpr had thousands of prisoners of war and were allied with the Pirates (who I had never even heard about).

General Yuqiwuara, despite being well-deceived by the despot’s smooth words, was clearly still stirred by the flame of rebellion and offered to consider further collaboration with Fenpr conditional upon my promise to not harm West Uuqita. He also informed me that the loyalists were sweeping the area in search of the captured general (who I had placed in Ghenio) and advised that I relocate or kill them. I wrote back to dispute some of the incorrect claims about my acts and to establish stronger working relations with the burgeoning nation of West Uuqita but this letter could not be delivered, as would quickly become a running theme, almost to a cartoonish degree, in my relationship with Yuqiwuara.

It was directly after this that I made my second major miscalculation of the game. I made the decision to forage in the area surrounding Ghenio. I failed to account for the fact that I had already partially foraged this area a few days earlier when I had ordered a portion of my troops to retreat a day south, pick the land clean, and return to my army. I was completely unaware at this time of the scale of the map. It would have cost me nothing to actually verify that no part of the area had been foraged yet, but I failed to consider the possibility that I had foraged anywhere near my location and I was punished with my first uprising.

I don’t know how many angry peasants made up this rebellion, but I didn’t need to ask to know that I didn’t want to be there. In a bizarre scene, the West Uuqitan army was besieging Oshenya and the East Uuqitans were besieging Hounslow. I was holed up in Ghenio, and there was an amassing force of rebels whose presence no one had counted on. In a striking setpiece, there were four armies, none of whom could truly be considered to be actually aligned with any of the other three, all crammed onto a rather small isthmus. It was in this precarious situation that I made the tactical decision to run away from the consequences of my actions, foraging on the way back and later around my capitol.

Typically it would pay to be worried about a peasant insurrection angry at me for overtaxing them. But I was beginning for the first time to feel the danger of being an undersupplied army and I assumed the two other hostile forces situated on the same isthmus would be more than enough to scare them back into hiding. Escaping the situation was most likely safe, likely rather disorienting for all other parties, and gave me time and space to resupply, deal with matters at home, and observe the conflict from afar. And, as long as I did not provoke the locals at Ghenio further, I wouldn’t have to ''actually'' deal with these annoying consequences.

It is worth mentioning the goal of the Uuqitans. Both parties were searching for the lost East Uuqitan commander, taken weeks ago by my army at Hounslow. The East Uuqitans’ goal was clearly to reunite the commander with their army, while the West Uuqitans were presumably intending to secretly kill the commander themselves. After all, the collaboration between the two halves of the nation was strictly financial. It was clear that no true friendship existed.

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